Sometime this week, the government is expected to invite MPs to vote on whether to extend the restricted scope of Britain’s aerial bombing sorties against one of the cruelest terrorist organizations that humanity has ever seen. I hope very much that the vote takes place and the motion is carried.

This isn’t a knee-jerk response to the Paris bombings. This motion represents the sober judgment of the prime minister about how to make Britain safer — in the short and long term — from a movement that poses a growing threat to our way of life.

The rhythm of horror has been quickening: the killing of 30 British tourists on a beach in Tunisia in June, the Russian jet blown from the sky earlier this month, the Paris massacre two weeks ago — all of them claimed directly by Syria-based Daesh/ISIS — to say nothing of many other grisly bombings and shootings around the world.

At home, British security services and counter-terrorism police are now obliged to monitor thousands of people who could intend harm to the country. The pace of activity has accelerated to the point where they’re now making almost one arrest every day.

This so-called caliphate is not only the origin of an increasing number of plots against Britain and other countries — two of the Paris bombers, at least, were jihadis returning from Syria.

It is a landscape of the imagination for the Western would-be jihadis and those at risk of radicalization. We rational people can see it for what it really is: a kind of Mordor, or the brutalized realm of Colonel Kurtz — where children play with decapitated heads, where prisoners are burned alive in cages, where gay people are thrown out of windows and where elderly women are shot and put in mass graves because they are deemed to have no use as sex slaves.

We see it as the home of an evil death cult. But in the minds of these potential recruits, it has a dark charisma: a place whose very racism and viciousness somehow indicate a fascist purity.

As long as it exists, the so-called Islamic Caliphate will exercise a death-star pull on the minds of those who are willing to be deluded. The longer we tolerate the existence of this vast feculent breeding ground of hate — with a captive population of 10 million — the worse it will be for the world, and the more spores of terror will waft over the Web and lodge in the minds of young people in European cities.

If you ask, very sensibly, how exactly we are going to achieve our objective by bombing from the air, then the answer pretty obviously is that we can’t, or certainly not immediately. But that doesn’t mean that aerial bombardment is pointless: It has helped to drive Daesh back in Iraq; and it will enable us to be of more use to those terrestrial forces willing and able to take them on in Syria.

Who are they? Whose boots will be on the ground? The only way to work that one out is to build on that international consensus, to create a coalition in which everybody — Russian President Vladimir Putin included — lives up to their rhetoric and turns their fire unequivocally on Daesh.

That means more than just the 70,000 non-Daesh rebels, including the Free Syrian Army and others. It probably means brokering a ceasefire between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the non-Daesh rebels, as well as agreeing to a timetable for the eventual removal of Assad, and gradually ensuring that all are focused on the common foe.

Of course it will not be easy; not when Putin was Sunday bombing some of the anti-Daesh, anti-Assad rebels, and not when Assad is actually buying oil from Daesh. The place is a writhing bag of snakes. But just as no British military action can be a substitute for a political deal, so no British diplomacy can be effective if we are only half-engaged. How can we be taken seriously if we fail to join a coalition of some of our closest allies?

To those who say we risk blowback, I say we already face a systematic terrorist threat; and it is wrong to contract out the fight. You cannot say the do-nothing option has worked: We have seen 240,000 people killed in Syria; we have seen millions displaced; the biggest refugee crisis in our lifetimes and terrorist plots emanating from the ideological cesspit of the so-called Islamic State.

Of course bombing alone will not solve the problem; everyone can see that. But the military and political effort must go hand in hand, and Britain must be part of both.